The Lie That Will Keep You From Creating

The Lie That Will Keep You From Creating

Today’s COMPEL blog post comes from writer Meredith Boggs.

There was a lie that I long believed that crippled my creativity. It was the lie that I had to have something of value to offer the world or else I should remain silent.

It was the lie that my creating and composing the written word in a way that resonates with the souls of others, bringing beauty into the world through words, was not enough if it didn’t come along with a check with a certain amount of zeros at the end or generate thousands of Instagram followers. 

Allowing that belief to pervade, the belief that I needed to offer something of value to in turn be valuable, halted my creativity. The belief left me creatively stagnant for months. Rather than writing the words God had placed on my heart, I spent my days curating social media captions and formatting high-value PDFs, and doing all the things I had been told brought value. It led me to retreat within, offering less and less of my gift to the world because it didn’t measure up compared to what others were bringing to the world.

The heart of the struggle of living the creative life we were called to live is that we will never get to work, doing the very thing we were created to do, if we are too busy measuring our thing up against someone else’s thing. We will never be able to create from the essence of who we are if we’re trying to make sure there is a value proposition to our creative work.  

This lie I believed, the lie that I must create something of value to offer the world, because writing and the beauty of crafting words wasn’t enough, ironically could only be dismantled as I began to do that work of writing. That lie could only be rendered powerless if I sat down in the chair, fingers to keys, creating and crafting, stringing words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs.

If you’ve fallen prey to this lie and felt its crippled effects on your creativity, the gift that God has uniquely and divinely given to you remember this next time you sit down to write; There’s no one else that can do the very thing that you do. There is no one else who will do that work of creating for you if you do not do it. 

What a terrible loss it is to the world when we refrain from doing the very thing we were created to do because of the lie that what we offer is not valuable. Don’t deprive the world of your passion, work and creativity. Go out and create, fulfill the unique and specific calling on your life by creating and offering your words to the world.

 

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Comments

  1. Thank you. I needed that. I have been struggling for days with negative thoughts, “Like who wants to listen to you. What right do you have to write?” This helped me understand that my story is important also. God has given me the strength and wisdom to make it through a very dark time and now I need to share that wisdom with others.

  2. Thank you for your words. Thank you for refusing to believe the lie, and acting on that refusal. My life is blessed by this post, and I thank you. Blessings.

  3. This is the exact message I needed to read right now! I am struggling with where to go with my writing right now. Thank you!

  4. Susan Cort Johnson: December 29, 2020 at 10:06 pm

    As I read your piece I thought of the artist Vincent van Gogh. Did he ever sell a painting in his lifetime? Yet we can see his paint strokes in our mind when we say his name.

  5. Refreshment to my soul. Thank you.

  6. You have no idea how I need to hear those words! I haven’t truly written anything in almost two years simply because I felt like it wasn’t worthy if it didn’t generate income, likes or instant impressions. I have struggled with what to do about writing and how I am not serving God well with the gift He gave me. I can’t thank you enough for allowing Him to speak through you. I am so glad you quit believing the lie and that you’re offering the truth to others.

  7. Thank you, thank you for this!!